Deprivation/Child Poverty

I agree. The incidence of poverty as a proportion is much lower in households where someone is in work. Nevertheless, a significant proportion of the overall number of children in poverty live in homes where one parent or another is in work. A variety of measures is needed. We announced recently that we will above-index the child element of the working tax credit over the next couple of years, and that will be a significant help, increasing the return to work for many. The other area where we must be much more attentive—the Committee was right to draw attention to this—is in doing a better job of integrating employment support with skills support so that when people go to a job centre to look for work, they can get help with basic skills. My hon. Friend the Member for Bradford, North referred to the 16-hour rule, and we are strongly committed to ensuring that the system allows people to undertake courses to address basic skills problems, and for skills health checks to be routine. There has been good progress, but we must improve the opportunities to train and to obtain skills as part of the process. One benefit is that people will be better able to progress when they go into work, to increase their income, and to move out of poverty. The combination of the tax credit system and promoting support for skills will allow us to make more progress. As a result of personal tax and benefit changes since 1997, by October 2008, families with children in the poorest fifth of the population will be on average more than £4,000 a year better off in real terms. Those reforms have been key to our progress. I want to comment on the interesting point made by the hon. Member for South-West Bedfordshire—Conservative Members often draw attention to it—about severe poverty, and people living in households with incomes of less than 40 per cent. of the median. I want to draw his attention not to the 2007 report of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, which he properly and fairly quoted, but to the 2008 report, which contains an extensive commentary on that point. The position essentially is that the statistics that the hon. Gentleman quoted are not reliable. The 2008 report's executive summary states that"““children in households with less than 40 per cent. of median income—so called severe poverty—are on average less deprived than those in households with between 40 per cent. and 60 per cent. of median income””." It goes on to make the point that"““at the very bottom of the income distribution””—" that is—"““in the first and second percentiles, material deprivation scores are lower””—" there is less deprivation—"““than anywhere else in the bottom third of the income distribution””." It continues:"““It seems highly likely that a significant proportion of this group have high living standards, but, for whatever reason, their current recorded income is quite low””." Those points clearly raise some interesting questions for further research into what is going on with that data, but it shows from an unimpeachable source that the Conservative party cannot validly draw the conclusions that they do from that data. I do not want unfairly to criticise Conservative Members, but I caution against trying to redefine the problem. I heard the shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions on television recently suggesting that child poverty is not about money. The hon. Member for South-West Bedfordshire referred to a wide range of issues, including the report ““Breakdown Britain””. I do not agree with its description of what Britain is like.